Attitude is a key concept in psychology. Attitudes are positive or negative views of an "attitude object": i.e., a person, behaviour, or event. People can also be "ambivalent" towards a target, meaning that they simultaneously possess a positive and a negative attitude. Psychology (ancient Greek: psyche = soul or mind, logos/-ology = study of) is an academic and applied field involving the study of the human mind and human behavior. ...

Implicit and explicit attitudes

There is also considerable research emerging on "implicit" attitudes, which are attitudes which people are not consciously aware of, but which have real effects as identified through sophisticated experiments using people's response times to stimuli (how quickly they can make judgements about them). Implicit and "explicit" attitudes (i.e. ones people report when they consciously ask themselves how much they like a target objects) both seem to affect people's behaviour, although in different ways. They tend not to be strongly associated with each other, although in some cases they are. The exact relationship between them is not currently well understood.

Attitude formation

Unlike personality, attitudes are expected to change as a function of experience, and there are numerous theories of attitude formation and attitude change, including: It has been suggested that Personality psychology be merged into this article or section. ... Look up Experience in Wiktionary, the free dictionary This article discusses the general concept of experience. ... This article is being considered for deletion in accordance with Wikipedias deletion policy. ...

• Dissonance-reduction theory, associated with Leon Festinger
• Self-perception theory, associated with Daryl Bem
• Meta programs, associated with NLP
• Persuasion
• Elaboration Likelihood Model associated with Richard E. Petty
• Social judgment theory
• Balance theory

Cognitive dissonance is a condition first proposed by the psychologist Leon Festinger in 1956, relating to his hypothesis of cognitive consistency. ... Leon Festinger (born May 8, 1919 - February 11, 1989) was a social psychologist from New York City who became famous for his Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. ... Self-perception theory is an account of attitude change developed by psychologist Daryl Bem. ... Daryl J. Bem is a noted social psychologist at Cornell University, USA, and the originator of the self-perception theory of attitude change. ... Meta-programs are programs about programs. ... NLP can be an abbreviation for: natural language processing - an area of computational linguistics concerned with the processing of naturally occurring (human) language by computers. ... Persuasion is a form of influence. ... The elaboration likelihood model (ELM) of persuasion (Petty & Cacioppo, 1979) is a model of how attitudes are formed and changed (see also attitude change). ... The Social Judgment theory of attitude change was proposed by Carl Hovland and Muzafer Sherif. ... Balance Theory is a motivational theory of attitude change proposed by Fritz Heider, which conceptualizes the consistency motive as a drive toward psychological balance. ...

Attitude in the workplace

When it comes to Human Resource Management and recruiting, in recent years hire for attitude became a well known mantra. Several commercial tests such as the LAB Profile, iWAM and PAPI were developed to measure work Attitude and motivation, e.g. for pre-employment testing.

See also

• Allophilia
• Propositional attitude
• Social psychology